Homage in Catalonia:
One Hundred Years
of Modern Art

"Everywhere looks just like a painting by Matisse!" exclaims
Susan, who had just arrived from a bleak November in Scotland to join
us for a few days in the little Mediterranean port of Collioure. We
are walking from the train station to our flat through narrow streets
of medieval houses painted in pastel colours, facing a backcloth of
a cobalt blue sea and a pink-streaked sunset sky. "That’s
not surprising," I am able to point out with the exquisite joy
and superior knowledge of one who has been here for a whole month, "Matisse
painted a lot of his pictures in Collioure. He came here regularly."

It’s exactly a hundred years since Matisse first
arrived in the Spring of 1905 to discover the landscape and light of
Catalonia. Ever since, a host of painters has descended on this region
of Europe, once an independent country, that sprawls across the French-Spanish
border where the Pyrenees tumble into the Mediterranean. The small towns
of Collioure and Céret in France, and Cadaquès in Spain,
are especially proud of their artistic past and present. These places
inspired not only Matisse but also Picasso, Dali, Chagall, Braque, Derain,
Dufy and many other painters. So they ought to make attractive and interesting
destinations in their own right for the more mundane sort of tourist
like me. Visitors don’t just come for the galleries.

Each town is situated in a Pyrenean landscape of olive-
and vine-clad hillsides set against the more distant snow-covered peaks.
The winding roads reveal a number of fortified towns and castles among
rugged mountains and green valleys. Perpignan, Girona and Barcelona
provide lively city life. If your mood is relaxed, it can be difficult
to leave the sandy beaches lapped by the gentle Mediterranean sea. Days
without sun are rare on the coast, and the heat is tempered by sea breezes.

But it's now November and, despite the sunshine, the
dry, cold Tramontane wind is blowing hard off the mountains where the
first snow has appeared. Susan is regretting that she has not packed
her thermal underwear. It seems unlikely she will be sunbathing on the
beach during her short visit, so we decide to explore the local artistic
connections in more depth. At least it will be warm in the galleries.

Collioure
is probably the best known of the three towns outside the region, and
it is certainly the most painted. Tourist office publicity quotes Matisse
as saying that "Nowhere is the sea as blue as in Collioure."
(Or he might have said, "Nowhere is the sky as blue as in Collioure,"
depending which brochure you read. I suppose it depends if they're selling
the sea or the weather.)

The town is in Roussillon, or French Catalonia, a short
train ride from Perpignan and about twenty kilometres north of the Spanish
border. French is the main language in use, but we hear Catalan spoken
on a regular basis. The small harbour is dominated by a Knights Templar
castle, dating originally from the fourteenth century, and a famous
and much-painted bell tower. A few boats still fish for anchovies and
some brightly-painted traditional sailing barques are moored by the
harbour wall among the more familiar holiday yachts.

Painters at their easels crowd round the harbour and
Collioure’s other bay, the palm-edged Boramar beach.The artists
vie for position with the tables and chairs of the many cafés
and restaurants. There is something special about the light: colours
are sharp and luminous and the bell tower seems to float between sea
and sky. At sunset the horizon always glows pink. Hence the name Côte
Vermeille or Vermillion Coast, given to this stretch of coastline. But
nothing is certain here: some claim the name originates from the pink
rock found along the coast.

With Matisse’s visits, Collioure became a Mecca
for the Fauvist school of art. Reproductions of pictures punctuate an
'artists’ walk' around the town, indicating where they were originally
painted. In the town centre, the Hôtel des Templiers is not only
a popular local bar but also the most interesting art gallery. The walls
are covered with paintings, many of which have been donated over the
years by artists working in Collioure. If you stay in one of the hotel
rooms, you will find the pictures continue up the stairs and along the
corridors.

The town gallery occupies an elegant eighteenth century
building surrounded by olive trees. It exhibits either a small 'permanent'
collection of modern art or a temporary exhibition by the town’s
most recent artist-in-residence, Patrick Jude. His accessible work is
not only good to look at but makes me laugh with its wry visual jokes
on the state of the world. For me, this collection goes some way towards
retrieving Collioure’s artistic reputation from the many mediocre
commercial galleries.

The Hôtel des Templiers also boasts one of many
excellent restaurants which provide meals at a languid pace and with
the serious attention to the food that you expect in the South of France.
A favourite dish is locally-caught fresh anchovies served with roasted
red peppers. At the weekends, French and Spanish families descend on
the restaurants with a harbour view, and even in November they sit outside,
well wrapped up, devouring huge plates of seafood accompanied by small
glasses of the punchy local Banyuls wine. An evening in a bar with a
Dutch artist reminds us that even the painters don’t just come
here for the light.

Céret
nestles in the French Pyrenees thirty minutes drive from Perpignan.
As a small mountain town with medieval walls and a 'devil’s bridge',
complete with legendary curse, it has a quite different atmosphere from
Collioure. Huge, ancient plane trees in the streets and the squares
fill the town with a musical rustling on a windy day. Its mountain setting
and beautifully proportioned houses in warm, pale yellow stone attracted
Picasso and Chagall, whose work, among those of a wide variety of less
well-known but impressive artists, can be seen at Céret’s
purpose-built Museum of Modern Art. This large and varied collection,
displayed in cool, spacious rooms, was founded by artist Pierre Brune
in 1950, and has been carefully nurtured and expanded ever since.

Céret has fewer tourist shops than Collioure and
therefore a more authentic feel, as well as being a centre of local
activity in this mountainous region. It is renowned for its cherries
as well as its artists. For centuries the town has been a haven for
those fleeing authority, most recently after the student revolts of
1968. Some indications of this history remain, with a number of New
Age-style shops and elderly hippies in evidence.

The
drive from Roses to Cadaquès,
on the coast of Spanish Catalonia, is just over an hour from Perpignan
if you take the motorway south and turn left at Figueres. Even if, like
me, you don’t rate Salvador Dali as a painter, it’s worth
stopping at Figueres to look around the extraordinary museum he designed
to house the collection of his own work. Maybe he should have concentrated
less on surrealist art and self-publicity and more on architecture.

The wind is still blowing fiercely as we leave the motorway.
The spectacular drive takes us first across plain and wetlands, with
the snow-clad mountains in the distance, and then twists through a jumble
of hills and random rock formations before dipping to the coast.

Cadaquès in November is more closed down and shabbier
than its French neighbours, but is no less atmospheric with steep cobbled
streets and dazzling white buildings leading down to a symmetric sheltered
bay and natural harbour. There are few boats, but in summer the harbour
is full of yachts, bringing the hotels and restaurants to life, and
we pass some grand modern houses on the coastal road climbing out of
town. Catalan is the main language in use, although Susan’s Castilian
Spanish is understood everywhere and greeted with delight.

As in Collioure, the spectacular position between mountains
and sea makes every view a picture worth painting or photographing.
The small Art Museum displays a variety of works by, and about, Salvador
Dali, who lived nearly in Port Lligat. That time was Cadaquès’
heyday as a destination for artists. On this clear but chilly Monday,
at the lowest point of the low season, we find only one tiny restaurant
on the harbour that is open at lunchtime. It is packed but they squeeze
us in and we are served the best paella I've ever tasted.

I should also mention Port Vendres, a busy, working,
deep-water port and active fishing harbour only four kilometres from
Collioure. Port Vendres has its own artistic links to Scottish designer,
architect and painter Charles Rennie MacIntosh, who came here from my
home town, Glasgow, in the 1920s. I feel that he, unlike Dali, should
have concentrated less on architecture and more on painting; some of
his most appealing works are views of Port Vendres. A travelling MacIntosh
exhibition sometimes visits the town, but there appears to be no permanent
record of his presence. The port could perhaps take a lesson from its
neighbours in this beautiful region of Catalonia for it seems that unearthing,
exhibiting and exploiting the artistic past is big business in the tourist
industry. But perhaps it prefers to retain it own character and remain
a more discrete working town.

This is a region to which I truly pay homage, for whether
you seek beauty in the scenery or in the art, here is a region that
can truly deliver both - often in the same helping.

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